"To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century."

"If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside."

"Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing."

"For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity."

"A life without philosophical reflection is a vessel adrift on an uncharted sea. For where clarity resides, peace inevitably follows — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"He who seeks peace must remember that a single spark of imagination can ignite the world."

"What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president."

"It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country."